Seven true tales about the journey to seek asylum in the U.S.

Joe Meno is a fiction writer and journalist who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and was a finalist for the Story Prize. The bestselling author of seven novels and two short story collections including Marvel and a Wonder, The Boy Detective Fails, and Hairstyles of the Damned, he is a professor in the English and Creative Writing department at Columbia College Chicago.

Meno's new nonfiction book is Between Everything and Nothing: The Journey of Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal and the Quest for Asylum.

At Electric Lit he tagged seven true stories about the journey to seek asylum in the U.S., including:

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Separated from her parents as a child, Danticat was raised by her uncle Joseph Dantica and his wife in Haiti. In 2004, her 81-year-old uncle fled the armed conflict between U.S. peacekeepers and Haitian gangs, and landed in Miami, where he was immediately placed in manacles. Two days later he was dead. Danticat’s blistering autobiography and memoir of her uncle captures the emotional cost many families suffer at the hands of the U.S.’s stultifying immigration policies.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue